


Salt Water Secrets

by poisontaster



Category: Alias
Genre: Canon Character of Color, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2006-01-02
Updated: 2006-01-02
Packaged: 2018-02-06 21:53:56
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,386
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1873842
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/poisontaster/pseuds/poisontaster
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>All families have their secrets, written in salt water--tears, semen, blood--and visible only when exposed to very strong light.  This is hers.</i>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	Salt Water Secrets

**Author's Note:**

  * For [The_Grynne](https://archiveofourown.org/users/The_Grynne/gifts).



> Written for the 2006 Spy Santa exchange. The request was: Request was Sark, Nadia; please include an agreement, a surgical scar, please _exclude_ fluff.

Sometimes Nadia wonders if Sydney thinks her life began the moment Syd found her in that Chechnyan labor camp.

She has little personal experience with siblings, but all the data would seem to indicate that this is rather common between youngest and eldest; a rather incompletely hidden assumption that the younger’s life is unimportant, except where it intersects with the older.

She thinks of that a lot, when she’s with Julian.

Sydney…would not understand. Would take it—this—as a betrayal. Of the CIA, if nothing else, and almost certainly a personal one, as well.

And maybe it is.

Maybe that’s why.

But it’s hard to think of things like that when his finger traces feather light over the tiny surgical scar in the hollow of her belly. “And what was this one?” he asks, taking his attention from it long enough to look inquiringly at her. The corners of his mouth crook familiarly, an expression Sydney would call arrogance. But then, she has little reason to know or understand the uncertainty it covers.

“Daring escape over the rooftops of Caracas? A stray bullet in the taiga forests of Siberia? Or perhaps…” she arches helplessly when he uses his fingernail and follows it with his tongue, “torture at the hand of some Vietnamese interrogator, immune to both your…beauty…and your…charms.” Each pause is punctuated with the touch of his lips, soft whispers of breath and heat.

“Nothing so interesting,” she tilts her head at him and smiles, ignoring the way he makes her toes curl. “Just my appendix.”

“Poor appendix,” Julian clucks in mock sympathy, “to be so callously discarded once it proved to be only a vestigial organ and not worth the trouble… I suppose you got rid of your tonsils too?” His palm slides smooth across flesh, from ankle to calf to the inside of her thigh with just enough pressure to tingle along every nerve ending.

He’s no longer talking about scars or organs. “Julian,” she says warningly, but his fingers continue their route undeterred; spread her apart and sink inside. Her head falls back, teeth biting hard into her lip, but she still manages to say, “This isn’t the arrangement.”

“Perhaps I want,” he says smoothly, driving deeper, harder, “to renegotiate terms.”

She doesn’t even remember how they met anymore; not exactly. One of a thousand boring diplomatic parties, one of the kind she will attend in the dozens, in exotic places whose names she can’t remember, in a gown whose boning pinches every time you take an incautious step, because they always do. At this one, she ended up with her comm ground to fragments under one too-high heel, her skirts up around her waist and _him_ whispering filthy and oddly accented gutter Spanish into her ear while she rode him to the floor of a broom closet on the second floor.

And that’s how it started.

Except it’s a lie.

She remembers him from the cloudy absinthe days when her father had held her, looking for Rambaldi’s cipher. Not clearly; none of her memories of that time are truly _clear_ , but—as if down a long tunnel—she has the one memory of his face, as the needle of poison slid home in her arm yet again. Lauren, the traitorous _puta_ , had been rapt, lips wet and parted; a fallen angel who only takes pleasure in pain. But Julian… He’d been sickened, shocked and his eyes had looked so very young even though he has a few years on her.

So maybe _that’s_ why. Maybe that’s how.

How this will end is just as murky, except in the immediate future of an orgasm intense enough to make her scream and him beg.

But for now, that’s enough. It satisfies.

She tightens her thighs over his hand and holds him in place. Julian has his piece of her life, small but important. Even so, it doesn’t do to let him think he’s more than merely useful. He should be used to that, you would think. The majority of Julian’s life has been determined by whom he’s been useful to and how. They have that much in common, as much a bond as this; moments bound in flesh.

“I’m not… _ah_ …open for negotiation, Julian,” she says in a voice like poisoned honey. She brings up her foot and plants it in his shoulder, shoving him backwards onto the mattress. She rolls so she’s the one on top, pinning his shoulders to the bed. They are freckled, his shoulders, and somehow this has always struck her as curiously dear. “This is the deal. It’s always been the deal. It has not changed.”

He is too soft for this game, she thinks, as she’d thought then and a dozen times before it. Julian can be both ruthless and cruel when the time comes for it, but he cannot mask what is in his eyes, and that’s a weakness.

Now she puts her fingers over his mouth, to keep him silent. She is done with talking. He kisses the tips, but he makes no noise, even when she reaches with her other hand to stroke him. He’s already hard; her touch makes him arch backwards and those scared-vulnerable eyes close, pale lashes fluttering.

His hands flutter too; graceful and long fingered, the same smooth light touch whether it’s a gun or flesh. He glides across her skin, connecting the scars, the nerves, the soft satin essence of _her_ into a single consuming phoenix feather that burns and then rises from the ash of itself to ignite again.

She fucks him slow at first. Because he likes it, because she does. They have all day; her cell turned off and left in a locker some blocks from here to avoid any misunderstandings. Julian is…between things. It makes her laugh, to watch the need, the _hunger_ build in his eyes and feel his hands tighten on her hips, trying to bring her onto him faster, deeper. She tightens her knees, shifts her weight back, and sets the pace to suit herself until he bares his teeth in a little grimace of surrender and lets his head fall back onto the pillow.

It’s a ritual as much as anything; she’s never left him hanging yet and he knows it. But there are steps to this dance and she likes his surrender as much as he likes to do it and let go. It allows her some measure of control and it allows him the chance to let go of it. And that satisfies.

He’s not as quiet now, deep catching gasps and groans as his hips rise and fall into her, stroking deep inside. It’s her turn for her head to fall back, her hair tickling against the curve of her rump and the undulating curve of her body supported only by Julian’s hands on the small of her back.

 _Con todo mi corazon… Con todo mi alma…_ This is what he whispers into her ear when he comes; _with all my heart, with all my soul…_ Words that they’ll pretend were never spoken when it’s over and washed away. But she still sees them, in his eyes. And sometimes, she wishes she could answer them with words of her own.

But she doesn’t. She averts her face and leaves, picking up her cell and the identity of Nadia Santos along the way. She wonders if this is what it was like for Irina, complicated as a Russian nesting doll.

Someday this will have to end. They both know this. One day, one of them will be on the wrong side of the gun or the glass and their ‘arrangement’ will dissolve into the shadow it’s made of. She accepts that. So does he, half-wistful hints of more aside. This is all there will ever be.

So much of her life is gone now; in Syd, in her father, in the incessant demands of APO. Months spent in coma while everything unraveled around her. It pleases her to have this, solely her own. This life, this _game_ ; it’s a sort of family, and hers more than most. All families have their secrets, written in salt water—tears, semen, blood—and visible only when exposed to very strong light.

This is hers.

It satisfies.


End file.
